We kick off the per- class coverage of our sixth Custom Contest, which had “Europe” as the theme, which meant that only castings that portrayed cars from that region could participate. And as usual, we start with the Basic class, which requires the custom to keep its original paint and allows only modifications to said paint, wheelswapping, general detailing, changes to the stance of the car, addition of accesories and very small changes to the body or chassis to accommodate accessories if necessary.

As stated in ourrulebook, every class was judged under the principle that the participating customs had to stick to the contest’s theme. Having said that, we leave you with the entries for this class and their customizers in alphabetic order. Down below you’ll find the winners of the first three places, with a small photoshoot of each, as well as commentary from our judges regarding why they won.

Judges comment: José entered a Fiat 500 from the Euro series which looked like a great detailing job, but it’s super-low stance caught our eye as the tires weren’t as tucked in as they should have been for the car to be that slammed: and indeed, a peek underneath revealed extensive metal trimming that stretched the Basic rules to the limit -we strongly considered sending the car to Modified– but since the rulebook doesn’t say you can’t trim down the underbody of a car to get the right stance, all was good and fine and José’s Cincuecento took third place with a result that can hardly been argued with.

Judges comment: Ahmed’s Porsche 356 portraits a street car with simple but time-proven modifications that have made these cars look great for decades; the most difficult part was achieving the right stance, since the original Maisto casting sits like a 4×4, but other than that, it was just a matter of deleting the bumpers and giving it some crazy detailing -peek at those rear vents and the chrome stripe in the hood, all of them metal foiled- to get a very cohesive result, with a lot of aesthetic punch. If Ahmed had painted the wheel spokes black, Fuchs-style, this thing would have been perfect.

Judges comment: Ahmed sweeped the class, also taking first with an excellent representation of James Dean’s famous “Little bastard”, which has much more work on it than it seems, as the red scalops in the rear fenders were painted on, they are not decals like the numbers. furthermore, its most correct and dramatic change, the wheels and tires, came from a 1:43 scale VW Atlantic -Mexico’s name for the first-gen Jetta- so adapting them to the Maisto casting was the most work-intensive part of the entire project, but it is, without doubt, what gives it its personality.